‘Libellule’: The underground project

With extensive experience as a video clip director, he has worked for artists such as Jonh Vermont, Reyko or Fernando Costa, where he has already shown a particular aesthetic aspect, which then led to his facet when it came to filming commercials and after directing the Short film ‘Fuck Blue Monday’, Madrid-based British Luc Knowles premieres his first film. Screened in the Zonazine section of the 25th edition of the Malaga Film Festival, ‘Libélulas’ now hits theatersin which the references to American social cinema are evident.

‘Libélulas’ aims to portray the situation not only of a generation, but of many who seem to have been condemned to abandonment and at risk of social exclusion. Its protagonists, therefore, are not teenagers but they are not adult enough to remember the young people who lived through the economic crisis of 2008. The problem is that Knowles tries to make his first film as universal an accusation as possible, provoking its setting is not a specific place, not even a fictitious neighborhood, which leaves the feeling of being in front of an artificial proposal.

It doesn’t help that it mixes Madrid’s suburban neighborhoods with more typical suburban homes in the United States, whose social cinema seems to have inspired Knowles. The desire to emulate the style of Sean Baker is very evident, in fact some sequences could very well belong to ‘Tangerine’, ‘The Florida Project’ or ‘Red Rocket’. And this is precisely one of the points in which ‘Libélulas’ shoots, despite the fact that with its title it tries to show the fragile balance of some protagonists who, really, do not end up being well defined in the plot.

It is assumed that both young women try to stop living in a neighborhood where there is apparently no future, the two do it in different ways, in what should be two different messages, in a sort of modern allegory of ‘La cicada and the ant ‘. However, Knowles is lost when it comes to adding a police subplot that, presumably, should be assembled in the story of these two friends.thus creating a vicious circle that makes us understand how marginality creates a web from which it is difficult to break away.

A first film that is saved thanks to its leading actresses

But that police conspiracy not only contributes nothing, but also ends up weighing down a proposal that suffers from being too ambitious to be a first feature. Even Knowles, who also wrote the screenplay, fails to give a soul to this urban environment, in which he tries to carry out an exercise in claiming the popular that ends up remaining in a series of sequences more worthy of a short film, although aesthetically very attractive, who remembering that Knowles gets too lost in form and neglects content, a kind of cinema then gone through the paint of a Netflix teen series.

Now, despite the disappointment with this debut, there is something that is saved: the interpretations of Milena Smit and Olivia Baglivi. The first continues her career with extreme roles, even if, in this case, the interpreter of ‘Madres paralleles’ shows her more hopeful side, with an everyday heroine who, finally, becomes the brightest part of the film. Baglivi, on the other hand, shows that he has the material for complex roles but, as happened with the failed ‘Rosalinda’, he is faced with a script that is not up to par. However, the interpreter, who bears an incredible resemblance to Ingrid García-Jonsson, once again shows an inner strength that, without a doubt, invites us to want to see her with similar characters.

Smit and Baglivi form a great tandem, they combine very well and this first causes more anger a project that could have given more, especially because it has moments that seem taken from “Who prevents it” by Jonás Trueba. ‘Dragonflies’ fails to convey that it really tells a story involved in social denunciation, leaving a film that manages to save some of the furniture for its two lead actresses, which doesn’t stop it from leaving a feeling of lost opportunity.

Note: 5

The best: The chemistry between Milena Smit and Olivia Baglivi.

Worse: The police plot affects the story in a very negative way.